Uncertainty and Its Propagation in Land Investigation

Abstract. The result of land investigation is very important, which helps to learn about the status of the national land resource and decision making. While the uncertainty and its propagation during the whole land investigation process will inevitably influence the result. In other word, how to reduce or avoid the uncertainty problem is very important as well as investigation itself. In this paper, we first start with discussing each land investigation procedures, such as image rectification, image classification, land particle information capturing and so on, in order to detect and classify the uncertainty and its propagation. Commonly, the land use map is the product of the land investigation, which is constitutive of discrete features with point shape, linear features and land parcels. Moreover, the uncertainty of these features can be described from several aspects, namely positional accuracy, attribute accuracy etc. Based on the study of practical workflow, the positional accuracy of land parcels is obviously the most important part of uncertainty estimation in land investigation. So, we will then focus on describing the positional uncertainty of land parcels with a proposed model. Consequently, we can get the quantitative description of the positional accuracy of land parcels and figure out the quality of land investigation.